Tim McGraw coaxed back to football by ‘The Blind Side’

Sandra Bullock as Leigh Anne Tuohy and Tim McGraw as Sean Tuohy in 'The Blind Side' (photo: Gannett, Ralph Nelson/Warner Bros. Pictures/File). Click to see a photo slide show from the local premiere.

Tim McGraw didn’t want to make another football movie. In fact, he was so adamant about it that he read through every script in his stack before returning to The Blind Side and giving it a skim.

When he did read it, he said he was so captivated by the story and the characters that he had to make a concession. The result is the most visible role of McGraw’s acting career, in a movie that many speculate will win co-star Sandra Bullock an Oscar.

“I realized it really wasn’t about football at all,” McGraw said of The Blind Side, which hits theaters on Friday, Nov. 20. “The story was about integrity and character and class more than anything. Then I found out Sandra was going to be involved in it. All these things started coming together. I just couldn’t say no to it.”

McGraw plays husband and father Sean Tuohy in Blind Side, the film adaptation of Michael Lewis’ book The Blind Side: The Evolution of a Game, which is based on the true story of Michael Oher and the Tuohy family. Oher, a 2009 first round draft pick by the Baltimore Ravens, was a homeless teen on the streets of Memphis before Bullock’s character — the wealthy, tough-talking Leigh Anne Tuohy — took him in.
Oher was a classmate of Tuohy’s daughter Collins, and when the mother of two saw Oher walking around in the cold one night, she ushered him into their car. The Tuohys gave Oher a place to stay, bought him clothes, a car, got him a tutor and eventually adopted him.

“It took a lot of heart and courage for this family to take the kid in,” McGraw said. “But you have to look at it through his eyes. It was very scary and dangerous, how he was growing up, but imagine this kid being taken into this family and how different the lifestyle was. In a lot of ways for a kid from the projects to be taken into this wealthy white family and this private school system, you know that had to be a lot scarier for him in some ways than where he came from. A lot of people did nice things for him, but he’s the one who knuckled down and did it.”

Tim McGraw is far from the only country star to move into acting. Click to see a rundown of others.

A focus on music

McGraw took the opportunity to meet the Tuohy family during filming, but said he was careful not to imitate Sean in the movie. Instead, McGraw saw his job as playing off Bullock’s highly charged portrayal of Leigh Anne. But accomplishing that and portraying Sean’s mild-mannered nature proved a challenge for McGraw.

“He’s a guy who is sort of like me in a lot of ways,” McGraw said. “He’s sort of laid back. There’s not a lot of high emotion... The hardest thing to do is play a character that doesn’t have a huge range to start with, but he personifies this quiet strength that this family has. So the challenge is to portray this guy who is the baseline for everything without jumping up and down and waving a flag saying, ‘Here I am.’”

Bullock, McGraw and the rest of the cast filmed The Blind Side in Atlanta over a period of about six weeks. McGraw said it worked well because it was just an hour flight between Nashville and Atlanta every day. But his next movie, he said, is going to be even more convenient: McGraw is scheduled to start filming a project (details about which he wasn’t able to divulge, aside of the fact that Gwyneth Paltrow co-stars) in Nashville in January.

But McGraw wants to assure fans of his music that he doesn’t plan on shifting careers anytime soon.

“I’m keeping a strong focus on my music, too,” he said. “Music has done everything for me, gotten me everything great in my life, and allows me the chance to do these movies. But if I can find a movie that interests me and falls within the time frame of what I have, it is fun to do. I want to get better at it, too. I’ve gotten more comfortable with it, but it’s like anything. That little bit of (discomfort) is what creates the edge that makes things work.”